Blood, sweat, tears, and..shit, basically.

Menu

Life of a university student – Part one

Your handphone (because you’re too hip for alarm clocks) tells you that you have 5 hours to sleep and you smile to yourself. That’s more than usual. Sleeping in the wee hours has now become a norm, although it never really feels that way. It’s not insomnia, narcolepsy or any other sleep disorder. It’s life as you know it. Your energy levels start to peak after ten and you feel the life draining out of you by the time it’s four in the morning. You treasure every little bit of your afternoon naps and it feels like the best thing in the world (especially on rainy days). You spend your weekends (when you have them) on your bed, getting up only for trips to the washroom and to collect your food (yes, breakfastlunchdinner in bed, if possible). Sleep: You can’t get enough of it and it can’t get enough of you.

2) Mornings

The worst time of the day, everyday. You start to realize that the ultimate sense of freedom and a large part of why you work so hard is just so that you can attain a sense of freedom. Freedom, that is, in the world today, defined as being able to decide what time you want to go to bed and not having to worry about what time you have to get up. Unfortunately, it is as they say, “not everyday is a Sunday” and sometimes, you don’t even get Sundays. As you reluctantly prop yourself up, you feel the invigorating rays of the morning sun piercing through your baggy, watery eyes. It’s like she does it on purpose every morning, just rising enough till the rays are able to come at you at that one perfect angle. You set the alarm at multiple timeslots, all five minutes apart just so that you can get the satisfaction of hitting snooze but the only problem is.. ‘five more minutes..’ just doesn’t cut it no matter how many of these ‘five minutes’ you get.

3) Writing & speech

By now you’re probably an expert of sorts when it comes to writing an academic paper, which isn’t something you’d normally do, as a student unless you have to. The irony is that you dread these assignments when you are obligated to complete them but when you have submitted everything and have absolutely no obligation to do anything, you start to fantasize about writing a great paper about something else. The effects of writing one too many academic papers is now becoming more apparent as the days go by. You seem to find yourself lacking personal opinion and you start to realize that most conversations, intellectual or otherwise, has you making references to things you’ve learned or things that you’ve picked up in the course of your study. You don’t necessarily understand what you’re talking about half the time but you figure that if it rubbed off on you, it can rub off on others. Who needs to understand anything anyway? As long as the conversation goes on and your speech justifies your position as a university student. Oh.So.Intellectual.

4) Diet

Because mornings are such a drag, you, more often than not, miss the most important meal of the day. Sometimes, you console yourself by telling yourself that that little bit of toothpaste you swallowed would be substantial and your stomach will not growl in class, not again. You’ve had your stomach growling so many times that you’re not even embarrassed by it anymore. Sometimes, you’re unsure if it is you or the burley geezer beside you that hasn’t taken a proper shower in four days (come on, we all know that everyone takes a shower on Friday, at the very least). Your lessons are inconsistent when it comes to time and day so your once fixed or choice-driven diet is now running on a ‘eat when you can’ basis. That’s like having sex just for the sake of reproduction. Fortunately, you’ve come up with a simple solution to curb that persistent hunger that distracts you from all the wonderful streams of knowledge that pour into your eager mind day after day: think about the food they serve on campus.

5) Eager-beavers

You’ve seen them. You’ve heard them. More than once, you’ve wondered if they were robots with wikipedia imprinted in their complex electronic wifi-compatible brains. Their monotonous sounds voices speak of wondrous knowledge that raise eyebrows all over the classroom. “It’s like she knows everything” , you hear them whisper. “He’s like an encyclopedia” , exchanging glances with one another whenever these people speak. Sometimes, they get carried away and the lecturer cuts them off (you sneak a smile. Oh, you. ) but fret not, they are not daunted by instances such as these. They’ll rise up again, stronger this time. Over time, you realize that the knowledge found within these mystical creatures are mostly surface knowledge, like the user-created content of wikipedia.